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The Night Witches and Other Warrior Women of World War II

Khalid Elhassan December 8, 2019 31 min

Lyudmila Pavlichenko - World War II — WWII Red Army snipers. Pintrest

11. From Guerrilla to Mayor

Eta Wrobel helped found an eighty-member Jewish partisan group, and took the fight to the Nazis. She ambushed the occupiers’ supply convoys, mined roads, conducted hit-and-run raids, and otherwise did her best to hurt the Germans. The partisan life was a harsh existence, without adequate shelter, supplies, or medical care. On one occasion, Eta was shot in the leg, but the group’s only doctor was busy taking care of somebody more seriously injured. So Eta extracted the bullet herself: she dug it out of her leg with a knife, then sterilized the wound with vodka.

When the Nazis were forced to retreat in 1944, Eta was asked to become mayor of her town. She got married later that year, and moved to the US in 1947, where she raised a family. Looking back at her partisan years, Eta reasoned that: “The biggest resistance that we could have done to the Germans was to survive“.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.